Analytics

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Digital Marketing

What Is Your Strategic Marketing Plan?

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Knowing which direction to take your business and how to get there requires a comprehensive and actionable marketing plan

Digital marketing trends come and go as each year passes. Being aware of them and planning to take advantage of them to give your business’s revenue a lift is useful, but concerning your strategic marketing plan, you need to take a broader view and consider both short- and long-term goals and methods.

Your marketing plan is a detailed roadmap your company will travel throughout the year. It should encompass everything including who your customers are, what your content marketing strategy is, the marketing and promotions budget you will adhere to, the campaigns and tactics you will deploy and more.

Seven Essential Steps to Strategic Marketing Planning

Every business is idiosyncratic and requires a clear marketing plan pertinent to its overall revenue goals and aims. Although there is no universal strategy your organization can adopt and follow, there are a series of established and sensible steps you can take to create an annual marketing plan that will suit your needs:

  1. Establish a Practical Promotional and Marketing Budget. Your budget will dictate what you will be able to achieve monthly, quarterly, and annually. Promoting and marketing events, products and services, and your company’s philosophy on doing business costs money. If your company’s marketing budget is modest, you will need to be creative, and allocate funds to the most important initiatives you will plan throughout the year.
  2. Revisit and Refresh Your Customer Personas. Customer or buyer personas are representations of your different customer segments, both real and desired. To get an accurate picture of who your customers are, you will need data derived from existing customer surveys and interviews, as well as other sources such as Google Analytics or Facebook Insights. Broadly defining your ideal customer personas will help your team understand who your customers are, what their needs are, and how your company can help them.
  3. Understand What Your Differentiators Are. What does your business do differently than all of your competitors? What is your unique selling proposition? What are your core values and your company’s key messages? Knowing what’s distinct about your company, its products and services, how they apply to your targeted customer persona segments as well as the messaging you will use for various media types will help you prepare a well-rounded content campaign or editorial calendar.
  4. Detail What Your Marketing Goals Are. What do you hope to achieve in the new year? Determining what your marketing goals are should go hand-in-hand with what your business’s overall goals are. Is that an increase in sales per quarter? Be realistic and ensure your goals are precise and well understood by everyone on your team.
  5. Evaluate Your Website and Marketing Collateral. Does your corporate website look outdated? Is it awkward to navigate? And is it a responsive website? What about all of your digital and printed marketing collateral? Make it an annual exercise to reassess all of your marketing channels and properties and ensure they are targeting the right audiences, and parlaying the right messages.
  6. Review Your Sales Strategy. Do you have a comprehensive and flexible sales strategy with achievable sales targets quarter-over-quarter? Or are you flying by the seat of your pants and making it up as you go? Although it is an important part of a holistic marketing strategy, your sales strategy should focus on increasing sales and meeting your quarterly revenue targets. It should include details about the customer’s journey both pre- and post-sale.
  7. Define Metrics to Measure Performance. You can’t determine success or failure or shift gears if need be without data that validates what worked and what didn’t. Once you’ve identified the key performance metrics you want to track, and the tools and methodologies you’ll use to measure your success, host regular meetings with your sales and marketing teams to decide if any changes are required and how to go about them.

Once you’ve reviewed how your company performed the previous year, and upon completing these steps above, you should be ready to craft a practical marketing strategy for the new year that will help your company meet its objectives.

Does your business need help defining its marketing plans and achieving the goals you want? Let us help. For more than 20 years we’ve been helping businesses of all sizes and in various industries grow their online presences and revenues.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing

Why Writing Good Content is Important and How to Start

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From your company’s site search engine ranking to the number of quality sales leads you receive, good storytelling and valued content reaps reward

Whether your company’s digital marketing strategy is successful or not depends on one key element: consistently producing and publishing great content.

Online and offline, we are bombarded by an unending stream of corporate messaging and advertising wherever we look or go. Naturally, we ignore content that does not interest us or that we regard as hype.

Entertaining and interesting content that centres on your audience’s interests or needs, meanwhile, spikes engagement levels, builds brand loyalty and trust, strengthens your website’s organic search engine ranking, and lifts your sales figures.

Think about it. You’re a consumer, too. When you’re online, what grabs your attention? Content and messaging rife with corporate jargon, spelling errors, and poor grammar? Or content that clearly and succinctly addresses a challenge you face, is educational, or useful to you in some way?

Can You Tell Your Customers’ Story Effectively?

Fifteen seconds. According to digital content analytics company Chartbeat, that’s about the average length of time visitors to your website spend reading your content.

And don’t be coaxed into thinking if someone socially shares a link to one of your webpages or blogs that they read it first. Some social sharers do, but many don’t. A joint study by researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute revealed, “though social networks commonly measure a story’s popularity in shares, researchers found that 59% of all links shared in their sample went unclicked, and presumably unread.”

But here’s more promising news: data from the Pew Research Center finds smartphone users will spend an average of one to two minutes reading news articles provided they are well-written and of interest to them. Additionally, having a mobile-friendly website goes a long way toward attracting and retaining mobile-based audiences.

Nevertheless, it still presents you with a formidable challenge. And if you’re still reading this article, consider you need to be able to produce impactful, compelling, and SEO-optimized content that is of interest to your intended audience for a broad range of digital and print properties, including:

In light of the above, there are other important factors to weigh. Can you tell your target customers’ story well? Can you write concisely about how your company and its products and services solve people’s problems? Do you have the time to do it on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis consistently? And do you have the bandwidth and know-how to track the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts?

Admittedly, that last one was a trick question. Determining how strong your content’s performance is (the return-on-investment) at increasing your sales leads and revenues is no simple feat. Why? Because content marketing is a long play, and you need to decide which metrics are important to track.

For example, many companies and publications are taking a different approach to online measurement. By switching from solely tracking the number of pageviews and click-thrus to including time-on-site and other attention-focussed metrics, their goal is to try to infer which content resonates with their audiences most.

Good Storytelling Creates Value

Good storytelling stirs interest and creates meaning, fosters contemplation in its readers, and in turn, becomes valuable to your intended audience. But not everyone is a natural storyteller. And not many business owners or leaders can commit the time to writing engaging content for all of their company’s marketing needs.

You need to be able to weave a compelling tale; to sell without selling. In short, you may need to hire a ghostwriter, aka an anonymous writer, to tell your customers’ story (and subsequently yours) to the world.

Some of the world’s most important literary works were written by anonymous writers. And the practice of hiring a professional writer to write on another’s behalf is as common today for everything from business books to marketing collateral to thought-leadership articles, blogs, and company websites.

But you’re keen to write your company’s content yourself. Okay, what do you need to do? How much time can you commit to writing? And how do you go about writing stories and marketing content that appeals to your existing and prospective customers intellectually or emotionally? Try these tactics:

  • Find the right topics. The notion of brainstorming with others is dead, and besides, there are no guarantees it will work. Does that mean you need to dismiss collaborating with a group of people altogether and go it alone? Not necessarily. Conferring and working with trusted sources to come up with important topics and an editorial calendar, or to discuss how to approach writing about a particular subject can produce great results. Most importantly, think about your customers and the questions they have for your company. Arrange to have an informal discussion with one of your longtime customers to get their thoughts if you’re uncertain. Or tell a story about how you failed at something – reading someone else’s account of how they mucked up badly, but who ultimately learned from the mistake and went on to succeed never gets old. You can also create a list of what are referred to as “evergreen topics”. Evergreen stories are based on broad subjects that have lasting appeal like why content marketing is important.
  • Manage your time efficiently. Just as you would plot the tasks involved in conducting any other aspect of business, build an executable schedule that divides up the work you need to do, and don’t waver from it. As you begin to write, different things will occur to you, so allow for lots of revision and editing time.
  • Research your topic. Once you know what to write about, hop online and find statistics, as well as the supporting or opposing points of views of others and link to them (or cite them accordingly). Depending on what your topic is, and if you can’t find useful sources to cite, you can always get help from a librarian in your community.
  • Write your first draft. Ernest Hemingway is famously quoted for allegedly remarking, “The first draft of anything is shit.” Whether he uttered those words or not, there is truth in the sentiment, and it is this: don’t get emotionally attached to the first draft of anything you write. Let it ferment in your head. Read it aloud. Have others proofread it for errors. Get the feedback of others you trust, and don’t be hurt by their constructive criticisms, mull them over. Then revise your first draft – and second, third, or fourth drafts if necessary.

Any literate person can write, but writing well is hard work, and you need to be damn good to attract and retain an audience, especially online.

It takes a significant amount of time to adequately research, write, edit, and produce good content for different media types and audiences. You need to discover what your brand’s voice is, determine your writing style, and commit to the craft on a daily basis.

In her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, American poet, author, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou wrote, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” I couldn’t agree more. But sometimes, you need a professional writer’s help to tell that tale effectively and generate the reaction you desire.

Are you ready to tell your story to the world? Drop us a line and tell us what your content marketing and storytelling wants and needs are.

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Mobile App Development

4 Ways to Make Money with Your Mobile App

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Deciding which monetization model best suits your branded application depends on many factors

Like the moneyed prospectors who raced northwest to the Yukon’s Klondike region in the late 1800s in search of fortune in the form of gold, the modern equivalent of the gold rush may be the desire of businesses and independent developers to create a new revenue stream via a mobile application. But like the Klondike gold rush, not everyone will end up hitting the jackpot.

Conceivably, finding a way to make money from a mobile app is similar to the plight of social media marketers to generate sales through the use of compelling content, in that it comes down to a question of user engagement.

There are different ways to generate revenue through a mobile app. Deciding which model to adopt and what to charge your targeted audience may be the most taxing call you will need to make. But here’s food for thought: according to research by Statistica, the most profitable option is the in-app purchase. In 2012, global in-app revenues were an estimated to be US$2.11 billion and are predicted to rise to $36 billion by 2017. However, the in-app model may not be the lucrative windfall for all types of apps, with about 15% of smartphone users making such a purchase.

Four App Monetization Models to Consider

In general, apps have four major channels available for generating revenue. Determining which model you should employ depends largely on the type of app you have or intend to build, and what your expectations are for user engagement:

  1. Charging to download it from the Apple App Store or Google Play.

    Provided your app offers something of value to your customers, then you can monetize it by charging people to download and use it. However, you should also know that Apple and Google will take approximately 30% of every sale or download, and the cost you can affix to your app must be based on either Apple’s or Google’s pricing scales.
  2. Using mobile ads banners and offering an ad-free version of your app.

    Instead of charging your users to download and use your app, you can sell advertising space in it like many newspaper companies do, and subject your users to mobile ads banners within the app. You can also charge your users for an ad-free version of the app, but know that Apple and Google will take 30% of what you charge your users for an ad-free version of your app.
  3. In-app purchases.

    While allowing your app to be downloaded for free, in-app purchases are purchases your users make inside of your mobile app. The items they purchase could be to access additional features of the app, or for virtual items to use within your app. For instance, many gaming apps provide in-app purchases so their users can buy special characters or abilities within whatever game they’re playing. It is currently the most successful way of making money with an app. You should also be aware both Apple and Google will take 30% of all in-app purchases.
  4. mCommerce or mobile commerce.

    Whereas we refer to selling products and services online as “eCommerce”, selling goods or services via a mobile device is known as “mCommerce”. The good news with mCommerce is neither Apple nor Google will impose a 30% cut for whatever products your users buy via your app. However, a mobile app with mCommerce functionality also requires a backend server for things that can’t be done solely on-device, such as sharing and processing data from multiple users, or storing large files. You will also need a payment processor to facilitate debit or credit card payments.

Other App Economic Options

There are a couple of other options to consider for your app: the freemium model, and the use of a paywall.

The freemium model is often found on gaming apps such as the wildly addictive Candy Crush, which allows users to play for free, and offers gamers the option of purchasing in-game features or an interruption-free version of the game. You’re not obliged to purchase anything in this game, but it will impose a short-term time-out on its users after they hit certain game milestones. For gaming apps, the freemium model has proven to be the most successful type to date, suggests data from mobile marketing and engagement firm Swrve.

The other option – one that’s typically used by newspaper and magazine publishers to generate subscription revenue – is the paywall. Similar to the freemium model, paywalls let users access a fixed amount of content for free before restricting access, and asking them to buy a subscription. The problem with the paywall model is unless you’re in the publishing business, it may not apply to your company or industry.

Are you curious if your business should create its own mobile app and how to monetize it? Zap us. Our knowledgeable and talented development team can bring your mobile app concept to fruition.

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Digital Marketing

Social Media Audit: Gain the Competitive Edge You Need

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Using social media in a way that resonates with your audience, builds trust, improves engagement, and drives sales begin with accurate insight

Twitter me this: What do most companies wrestle with when it comes to using social media tools? If you guessed “ROI” (return-on-investment), you earned a red heart (on Twitter, you can “like” a tweet by tapping the red heart icon).

While it’s important to sort out what type of social content you should produce to generate sales or accomplish other strategic goals, there’s an even greater uphill climb for businesses using social media to conquer: defining a holistic digital marketing strategy.

Furthermore, and as noted by the Harvard Business Review, research shows consumers’ so-called “electronic word-of-mouth” referrals or remarks on social networks about businesses and their services can significantly affect a company’s perceived value.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

Whether it’s determining your company’s ROI using social media, figuring out an end-to-end digital marketing strategy, both, or striving to reach other corporate goals, a social media audit is a research-based way to ascertain whether you’re achieving results using the social tools you are, and where you may be falling short.

It can also provide insight into which social channels you need to be on, and which ones to switch off if they’re not producing any tangible results. For example, does your company need to spend time using Snapchat or Pinterest? Are your customers or the bulk of your targeted audience using those platforms? An audit can help you find out.

It can also show you what posts or content you shared resonated the most with your customers, or that generated the greatest amount of engagement.

“To ask, ‘what is the ROI of social media?’ makes as much sense as asking, ‘what’s the ROI of the telephone?”
– SAMUEL SCOTT

Why Vetting Your Social Presence Is Paramount

Some of the primary benefits an audit of your social network presence includes:

  • Competitive intelligence.

    Get the lay of your competitive landscape by analyzing what your primary and secondary competitors are doing on social networks. Take note of both the good and bad because it can help you and your team be more effective with your efforts.
  • Audience analysis. 

    Who is your audience and what social networks are they on? Do you have any social influencers or people who engage with you frequently? And what are your primary objectives for using social networks? A social media audit won’t definitively answer all of these questions – that’s where a social strategy comes in – but it will help you compile the information you need to get there.
  • It’s the foundation for your social marketing strategy.

    To accomplish corporate goals using social media, you must have a thoughtful plan. To establish an in-depth and forward-looking social media marketing plan, you need to review how and what results you’ve achieved to date.
  • It’s integral to measuring your digital marketing performance.

    You need to know where your company is in the social media sphere. An audit can help you shift from a broadcasting mentality to one of engagement. That’s the genesis for building trust with your customers and followers: being helpful and creating value.

Are you ready to aim a magnifying glass on your social media performance? Get in touch. A social media audit can help you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you need to understand in order to develop an impactful social marketing strategy.

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Digital Marketing

Why Are SEO Discovery and Audit Services Important?

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Effective SEO isn’t solely about how your website ranks in an organic Google search

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to your company’s online presence. The purpose of SEO is to obtain high visibility for your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and elsewhere by ensuring it ranks on the first page of the organic searches people perform. In other words, SEO makes it easy for your customers to find you online.

An oft-misunderstood online marketing tactic, SEO is an increasingly vast and complex methodology, and it’s one of many crucial elements comprising a holistic digital marketing strategy. Search engines rank websites based on multiple factors; no one digital marketing method alone will rocket your website to the top of Google’s list and keep it there indefinitely, and that includes SEO.

The effectiveness of SEO is reliant on many other components and services including:

Done well, SEO can improve your search engine rankings, thereby increasing your website’s organic traffic, and in turn, helping you score new customers, earn more revenue, and realize a high return on your SEO investment. But understand SEO isn’t only about your site’s ranking. One of your webpages may be ranking well for a keyword you’ve identified as relevant to your business, but if visitors to that webpage aren’t finding what they need quickly upon arrival, they’ll “bounce” or go elsewhere. Thus, user engagement is a major factor in Google’s determination of the value of any website. If large volumes of visitors are leaving your website rapidly, it will hurt your overall SEO ranking in the long run.

Research from multiple sources has quantified the value SEO provides for companies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) industry verticals. For instance, when conducting online procurement research an estimated 89% of B2B professionals start with a generic search. From a B2C perspective, about 72% of consumers who perform an organic search for a specific product or service visited a store or business within 8 kilometres of their location, and four out of five consumers use a search engine to find businesses in their vicinity.

However, like all things within the realm of business, there is no magic wand to wave that will produce instantaneous results. SEO involves research and analysis. Among the first steps to improving your site’s SEO ranking requires what’s known as an SEO discovery and audit session. It helps to determine which of your webpages are ranking as per targeted keywords, which ones aren’t, and what needs to be done to improve overall performance.

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
– ALBERT SZENT-GYÖRGYI DE NAGYRÁPOLT

Learning about Your Business and Customers

Before an in-depth site audit is performed to gauge the health of your website’s current SEO ranking and how it can be improved, a pre-audit discovery session is required. An integral part of an effective SEO strategy, the purpose of a discovery session is straightforward: it sets the stage for an organized, useful, and strategic audit.

There are five things an SEO discovery session should include:

  • A comprehensive client interview. We need to learn about your business and industry and your products and services. We need to know who your existing, and prospective customers are, the lexicon you and they use, how and where they connect with you online, and what’s driving online conversions or sales today.
  • Determining what your goals are. A goal without a plan is but a wish. Setting realistic, executable goals serves two important functions: it clarifies what it is you want to achieve with your website, and how compiled data should be measured.
  • Access to real-time analytics. Assuming your company uses Google Analytics to track how online traffic arrives at your site, how long visitors dwell on your webpages, and whether they buy or bounce. The more historical data you can provide, the better it is during the audit phase and for plotting your future. If your business uses or has used Google AdWords, the data it can provide helps paint a more complete picture of your website’s performance to date.
  • What keywords you think are best and why. Forget about your current SEO ranking for the time being. In the discovery session, we need to have a clear understanding of the keywords you think are relevant to your business, and why you think your customers would use those keywords to search for your products and services.
  • The quality of your site’s current content. How often do you refresh your website’s content? What is the quality of the content on your site? Your content needs to be well-written, impactful, and it should accurately and succinctly articulate what benefits your business and products provide. If it’s rife with spelling errors, poor grammar, and rambling, incoherent jargon, it will severely diminish your SEO ranking.

Auditing Your Website

With the discovery session complete, we conduct a thorough SEO audit of all of your web properties, and subsequently, provide you with the details of that review and our strategic recommendations that are tailored to your company’s needs.

Our SEO audits and assessments typically include:

  • Competitive intelligence on your competitors
  • Keyword analysis and recommended targeted keywords
  • Reconfiguring your Google Analytics and AdWords to reap more insightful data
  • Local search optimization for Google My Business and other directories
  • Gauging your site’s mobile responsiveness and how mobile search impacts your SEO
  • The usefulness of your inbound links versus your competitors’
  • Recommendations about your site as a whole to improve engagement and increase visitor conversions

An in-depth SEO audit and discovery session takes the guesswork out of what resonates with your existing and potential customers, and it helps to determine a path forward based on data and your business’s strategic goals. It also lays the foundation for building your ongoing marketing plan to ensure you’ve got inspiring and effective content and messaging, a high-quality, responsive web presence, and above all, a compelling reason for the world to land on your pages first and foremost.

Do you have questions about SEO and its effectiveness in conjunction with other digital marketing methodologies? Talk to us. Whether your company is big or small, a startup or a recognized brand, we have the expertise and the experience to optimize your site and boost your website traffic.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing, Web Design & Development

4 Reasons Your Email Unsubscribe Numbers Are on the Rise

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Are you taking a ‘megaphone’ approach to your email marketing campaigns in an effort to reach as many people as possible? The key to keeping your customers engaged comes down to sending targeted messages at precisely the right time

It’s the winter and a weeklong cold spell has you shivering. Snow and ice are everywhere. As an icy wind freezes your face while you stand outside waiting for a bus to arrive, you feel your mobile phone vibrate in your pocket. You peel off one of your gloves to check your messages only to find you’ve received an email about ice cream, frosty milkshakes, and frozen desserts.

You wouldn’t think a company would send such an ill-timed and poorly targeted marketing message, but it happens more often than not, and it typically prompts the recipient to hit the “unsubscribe” link in fine print at the bottom of that email.

Irrelevant messaging is a significant driver of unsubscribe rates, and importantly, it’s an annoyance to your customers. According to IBM Silverpop’s annual global report on email marketing dubbed, “2015 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study”, Canadian brands posted markedly lower email opening rates compared to companies in the U.S., U.K., the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the Mideast, and Africa. It could be because of many reasons including consumers are quick to delete emails that don’t resonate with them immediately.

In addition to the content of marketing communications, the format of marketing emails may also be a factor. A study by Litmus found nearly half of emails are now opened on either a smartphone or tablet. That’s a dramatic increase from 2011 when only 8% of emails were opened on a mobile device. In light of this finding, marketers would be wise to adopt a mobile-friendly approach to the content and design of their emails, and they should reduce the number of calls-to-action to one or two per email.

When Email Open Rates Slide and Unsubscribes Spike

Though your email open rates data shouldn’t be used as a sole indicator of a marketing campaign’s success or failure, it is a useful metric to measure. Your email subscribers are valuable. Reducing email list churn is dependent upon understanding why existing and prospective customers unsubscribe from your communications.

After spending the effort (and money) to get your customers to opt-in or subscribe to your marketing emails and to keep them engaged, it is disheartening and frustrating to see unsubscribe levels increase. Outside of irrelevant messaging, there are four primary reasons why people are unsubscribing from your email lists:

  • You’re emailing them too often. When was the last time you heard someone complain they don’t receive enough email? Determining what the right frequency is to send your subscribers an email is multifaceted, but it comes down to the size of your list, the quality of your email content, and the unknowable: how receptive your subscribers truly are to reading your emails.
  • Your emails aren’t smartphone-friendly. Email remains the most effective and affordable digital marketing tool at your disposal to reach your customers, but are you crafting and designing your marketing emails for mobile device readers? With an estimated 68% of all emails in 2015 opened on a mobile device (tablets comprise about 16% of that total) versus on a desktop, it’s wise to assume your emails will be read on a smartphone.
  • All you do is try to sell to them. Are you hitting people over the head with an unending stream of “buy this!” type of content? It’s good to make your customers aware of current and upcoming promotions, but if all you’re doing with your email marketing content is pushing your recipients to purchase something, they’ll start to tune you out.
  • Your content is repetitive and uninteresting. If your email content triggers déjà vu in your audience, or it’s merely uninspiring drivel that serves no real purpose, all you’re succeeding at is inviting people to hit the unsubscribe button.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him (or her) and sells itself.”
– PETER DRUCKER

Zeroing in on Targeted Messaging

Not all of your marketing communications will be relevant to all of your customers, so choose smartly, and don’t lose sight of your marketing campaign objectives. Keep these key points in mind before you hit the “send” button:

  • Define your target audience. Knowing who to market to and why will dictate the success of your email campaigns. You need to understand who has a need for your product or service, who is most likely to purchase it, and what’s most appealing about it to them.
  • Be specific. Your brand is at the heart of your messaging, so narrow down what it is you’re trying to tell your audience and clearly state it. Are you trying to get them to purchase something new? Are you attempting to provide advice? Or are you wanting to draw attention to something your company has done for the betterment of the local community? Avoid emailing mixed messages; they only lead to confusion (and the virtual trash bin).
  • Tailor your messages per channel. Don’t clone your marketing messages. In other words, whatever messaging you use in an email, shouldn’t be the same messaging you have on your website, use on your social media channels, or have printed on brochures. Particularly now in the age of mobile computing, you need to strategize how best to reach your targeted audiences via varying avenues or mediums and customize your content accordingly.
  • Timing is everything. Use your customer data to determine the best time of day to send your marketing emails. If you do, in all likelihood you’ll see a high number of emails opened, and the links within it clicked. Moreover, you won’t annoy your recipients by sending them an email in the winter about ice cream.
  • Get permission first. The most important point to remember is to make sure you have every recipient’s permission orally or in writing (electronic consent is acceptable) before you send them any marketing-related email. Moreover, take steps to protect your customers’ privacy. You should also make it simple for anyone to unsubscribe from or opt-out of your emails. Nobody likes to be spammed. And lest we forget, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) expressly forbids companies and marketers from engaging in such shady practices. CASL applies to all forms of commercial electronic messaging, not only email.

One last noteworthy point on the subject of CASL: According to the Canadian Marketing Association, July 1, 2016, marks CASL’s two-year anniversary, and it’s the deadline for two-year implied consent agreements to expire. That means you need to ensure you have permission for all of your electronic messages (emails, texts, etc.) from your list of recipients unless you have an existing business relationship with them. It’s also important to be mindful that as of July 1, 2017, Canadian citizens will have the legal right to sue organizations for CASL violations.

Want to learn how to create more sales leads via email marketing? Let’s talk. We can help you create meaningful content for your subscribers, develop a strategy for cultivating an effective email list, and analyze the performance of your campaigns.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing

Tips for Writing Impactful Content

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Your content needs to be thought-provoking, meaningful, and it must resonate with your target audience

The power of online publishing is such that every company is a media company nowadays, but is your company producing engaging and informative content?

According to data from the Nielsen Norman Group, you have less than one minute to entice a visitor to your website to stick around and explore. That’s not a lot of time to inspire rapt attention. If your site’s content doesn’t affect or appeal to its intended audience instantly and in an intellectual or emotional way, they’ll quickly lose interest, and you will lose business.

There are theories as to why and how cringeworthy content resides on so many business websites. It could be because of the oft-repeated “content is king” cliché that’s bandied about with wild abandon by marketing cheerleaders induces people to produce content for content’s sake. (Don’t do this) Or it’s possible business owners and decision-makers don’t want to pay a professional writer to help them. Regardless, if brands want to be successful publishers and use content to create relationships and up sales leads, they need to produce clear but compelling content consistently, and ensure it’s optimized for social media sharing.

Whether you’re writing for a corporate website, a blog, company e-newsletter, an advertisement, or emails to your customers, on the web, and especially in a world that’s increasingly dialled in via a mobile device, you have mere seconds to make that connection with your readers.

In general, there appears to be four content- or writing-related errors many brands make online:

  • Their content is poorly written and full of grammatical or spelling errors
  • The language used is sheer flimflam or gibberish, and it’s not the language their customers use
  • It offers no new perspectives or fails to recommend a solution to readers’ problems
  • It’s a standalone piece of work that’s not part of an overall content marketing strategy

Ergo if you’re scratching your head wondering why your website and marketing efforts aren’t bringing home the bacon, it could be because your content lacks sizzle, or it completely misses the mark.

“Words can be like X-Rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
– ALDOUS HUXLEY

There are many good reasons that you should consider hiring a professional writer to help you and your team consistently produce quality blogs, marketing materials, and website copy. These may include:

  • Writing isn’t your forte. Writing is hard work and writing well doesn’t come naturally or easily to a lot of people. There’s no shame in that. But if you forgo investing in a professional writer to help concisely articulate what it is you do, and the value your company provides to your customers and potential customers, you’re essentially handicapping your business. Nothing scorns the prospect of new business and potentially damages your company’s reputation than a website rife with bad or unnecessary copy.
  • You’re busy running your business. Undoubtedly, managing or running a business swallows up most of your waking hours. As a decision-maker or business leader, do you have the time to write website copy, advertising copy, blogs, social media content, case studies, white papers, and press releases? Chances are you don’t.
  • You lack objectivity. In other words, you’re the DNA your business needs to survive, but you’re so close to the heart of it, and so knowledgeable, you simply can’t write effectively about it to your target audience. Sometimes, we need a friend or colleague to point out to us that which we cannot readily identify. When it comes to writing content about your firm or industry, the same truth applies. It could be that something your company does which might seem trivial or unimportant to you may be what dazzles and delights your customers.
  • Your approach to marketing is flawed. You need to know who your target audience is, what they care about and the issues they need to solve, and how your products and services can help them overcome their challenges and reach their goals. But are all of your marketing efforts in-synch? Are your marketing campaigns tied to achievable goals? Are you speaking the language of your customers and leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in order to ensure your website ranks high in organic searches? Your marketing messages (in whatever form) need to be as smooth as silk and should feature a takeaway or call-to-action that matters to your audience. In general, it’s critical to understand that writing or producing content is but one important part of a holistic marketing strategy.

The Quality of Your Content Impacts Your Site’s Performance

Professional wordsmiths hang on every word they write. They agonize over every sentence and they analyze and assess how those words read, sound, and flow from one paragraph to the next. They rely on keyword analysis and recommended SEO best practices when choosing words to craft a sentence. It can be time-consuming, but it’s a wholly valuable and worthwhile exercise.

A well-designed website with high-quality images and photos and intuitive navigation is important. But don’t let these things overshadow your site’s readability. Content and messaging that’s clear, simple, and bold will increase the number of visitors to your website. It builds trust, positions you as a thought leader, and in turn, leads to conversions whereby prospective customers will have conversations with you about how your services can help them. To quote Mark Twain, “use the right word, not its second cousin.” Indeed.

But it isn’t solely a matter of choosing the right words. It’s also important to ably express what your business is all about, and what challenges you help your customers overcome. Doing so across all of your digital marketing channels will help your business stand out from others in online search rankings, and swell your social media follower count.

Consider these six do’s and don’ts when thinking about drafting content for your website:

  1. Do use a dictionary, the spellcheck feature in your word processing software, and have one or two people proofread your content before posting it live online to ensure there are no spelling and grammar errors. Read your content aloud to catch errors. If it doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t.
  2. Do write with authority and write for your audience. No one knows your company and its products and services better than you. Let your knowledge and confidence show.
  3. Do produce fresh content regularly. It works wonders for your website SEO rankings by keeping your brand front and centre, establishing you and your team as industry thought leaders, and it will keep people coming back to your site to read more.
  4. Don’t use fanciful, flowery words to promise everything under the sun and then underperform. It’s the opposite you need to shoot for. Under-promise and then exceed your customers’ expectations.
  5. Don’t use meaningless strings of keyword-stuffed jargon. Use plain language to get your message across sensibly and clearly articulate to your customers the value of your firm’s products and services.
  6. Don’t write excessively long marketing content, especially online. On one hand, it’s important to share your breadth of knowledge and expertise with useful, in-depth information. On the other hand, mobile computing and the Internet is changing how we consume the written word so dispense with unnecessary verbiage. You need to find the right balance between producing quality content efficiently without shortchanging your readers by being too vague.

We hope you’ve found this list of ideas for injecting content marketing into your business helpful.

Not sure where to start? Have writer blocks when it comes to content marketing? Get in touch with us. Our experienced team knows how to make your marketing materials sing.

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Branding & Design

7 Ways to Audit Your Brand

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Is it time for a brand refresh?

Your logo is one of the most critical parts of your branding. It is the visual manifestation of your business, voice, messaging and values. It multitasks, acting as your signpost, your calling card, your signature. It ties together every aspect of your marketing efforts and customer experience, from your website and signage to your invoices and receipts.

Your brand, however, is so much more than just your logo. It is your company’s personality and reputation. More importantly, it affects your customers’ recognition and positive impression of these elements. The most memorable and enduring logos stem from strong brand identities. Think of Nike, or Coca-Cola. Understanding your brand is the foundation for the visuals of your corporate character.

As with any part of your business, it is important to stay up to date with your branding.

How do you know that your brand needs an update? Here are seven important considerations.

1. You’ve recently changed your business

If you have acquired a new company, grown your business, or if you’ve started offering new services, it is a perfect time to update your brand. Your brand must speak to your marketing and consumers. If your business changes, your brand should adapt to reflect those changes.

2. There is inconsistency between branches of your business

We see this all too often with companies who have extensive, divided sectors of their organization. These sectors should compliment one another to promote a concise, consolidated brand.

3. You cringe or apologize when you show someone your logo or website

If this is you, stop reading right now and call Treefrog. You should be proud of your brand, your logo and your website. If you aren’t, your customers will know it.

4. Your competitors have updated their brands

We don’t mean this in a “keeping up with the Joneses” sort of way, but if your competitors are updating their brands, it means that they are going after new potential clients. That means, your potential clients. If they have a sexy new look that better represents their company, then something needs to be done about it.

5. It’s been 10 years since you updated your branding

A decade is a long time. Look at the differences in time between the 1990s to now. Your brand should keep up with how you do business. At no point should someone look at your logo and think “That looks so 1999!” Changing your brand does not mean losing sight of who you are. In fact, it means the opposite. Updating your brand carefully shapes your business while maintaining the authenticity, history and evolution of your company.

6. Your previous logo was not designed by a professional

If you used clip-art or a stock company to create your logo, you have not invested in your brand. Creating a brand should be a thoughtful, thought-provoking exercise that takes into account all the aspects of your company. It should be an investment into the identity of your organization.

7. You have lost your voice, audience or identity

If your current marketing is not working for you, it’s time to re-evaluate. You cannot expect to continue with your marketing as-is and expect different results. If you are not reaching your audience with the tactics you are using, then it’s time to change the conversation.

Your brand should capture and align with what your ideal customer is looking for. It should stand out from the crowd and invoke an immediate trust in your business.

Treefrog can help you gain new perspective on the perception of what your brand is, and what its potential could be. We can also help you understand your customers’ opinions and incorporate this into your messaging. Once we’ve helped you create a brand image that fits, we’ll help you transform the concepts into insightful and imaginative visuals that will make an unforgettable statement.

For more information or to inquire about updating your brand, contact us today.

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Web Design & Development

Retail Rule Applied To Websites

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3:30:3

You’re walking through the mall (perhaps looking for something specific, but maybe not). You come across a compelling storefront with a nice green tie in the window. You decide to pop your head in and take a quick walk around. As you walk around, your experience is great. You are not harassed by a sales associate, the store is neat and tidy and you are drawn all around the store and finally find that table of green ties. You commit and buy one.

This good old retail rule applies much the same to websites:

1) Grab Their Attention

Compelling graphic design and a professional look and feel makes all the difference in the next step of actually getting someone to commit to come dig in deeper and spend the next 30 seconds. You have 3 seconds to catch their attention and make them find something that they want to click on. For this, Site Architecture and proper navigation is key.

2) Give Them Something Of Value

Have information of value to your target audience that draws them to spend the next 30 seconds finding some areas that they wan to commit to. Caution against putting too much fuzzy “about us” content front and centre. Give people calls to action that answer the things that they need.

3) Have Them Commit

If you’ve done the job of giving them something to chew on, your site visitors will spend another 3 minutes exploring through the site. This critical path and end result will lead to your goal on the website, whether that is making a call, donating now, making a purchase, posting a comment or more…

How do you know that the 3:30:3 rule is in effect on your website?

Check your Google Analytics reports. If your bounce rates are high, that is usually an indicator that people are not finding what it is that they need off of your homepage and some work may be required. In addition, check and see the average time spent on your site. It should be greater than 3 minutes.

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Web Design & Development

How To Quality Assess (QA) Your Website

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Learning to pay attention to detail is not always easy!

So your web developer has built you a beautiful new website and has asked you to make your final review in preparation for going live. What should you look for?

As part of any good web development agency’s process, your site should have already gone through a vigorous internal quality assessment (QA) process and there should be scarcely a problem for you to find at all. Still, even the most talented and diligent web developers are still human and might miss something once in a blue moon, so it’s a good idea to do your due diligence and double check. Besides, this is your website, so you need to make sure you’re proud to show it off.

Things to Look For:

Accuracy to Original Design: Compare the original design that you approved to the end product to ensure that the coded version is true to the website design you love. Keep in mind that some adjustments may have been discussed along the way, but you should know about them and there shouldn’t be any surprises. Are the font styles right? Do bulleted lists look the way you expected them to look? If you have any rollover effects, make sure they’re working beautifully.

Images: Look at the images on your site and make sure they are picture perfect. Check for any lingering watermarks and ensure your images look the way they should and have aesthetically pleasing spacing around them.

Content: Check that you have all of the pages you need for your debut, and that all have proper grammar, spelling etc.

Menus and Links: Click on all of the menu items and links to make sure they all go where they should and that there are no pages with content missing. Links may also include PDFs and other documents you are offering for download from the website and email addresses for contact purposes. You can check that links open either within your site window, or open a new window as you specified.

Email Forms: Fill out your own email forms to make sure all of the fields are correct and working well. Then check your email for the results to ensure that you actually get the submission that the form is supposed to send.

Browser Check: Check your website on multiple browsers. Depending on what level of design and programming you purchased, older or less common browsers may have some compatibility issues, however be sure to check your website on the most common players: Internet Explorer 7 or above, Safari, and FireFox.

Privacy Policy: Did you know you are required to have a Privacy Policy? Many web developers will use a standardized version on your site, but make sure it’s there. If you are collecting any sensitive information, check to see you require more specific language.

Testing: If you have any e-commerce or custom system components, test them! Try processing a payment and be sure it gets into your bank account as set up through your third party payment gateway. Keep in mind that if you put through a charge, you’ll have to go back and refund your own money later.

An Exception to the Rule:

Search functionality: This is one of the few features of your site that may not yet be working when you first see it. Currently many systems search functionality is connected to Google, so it won’t be operational until your site goes live and has been seen by Google. This is good! You want Google to index your permanent domain, not the development URL used by web developers to build your site. Even after you’re live, the site search will be set up, but you won’t see any results until Google indexes your site. Still, in the days and sometimes weeks after you go live, it’s a good idea to go back and check it.

Sometimes Excellence is Better than Perfection

Your website is an extension of your business and needs to represent your quality and sterling reputation, but it will never be finished and most likely it will never be perfect. Your site will never be finished, you will always be nurturing and building it alongside your business. Once you have assured yourself that nothing is broken or missing and that it is in line with your vision, it’s time to set it free. A wise web developer once said that once your site is as good as or better than your existing site, get it live!

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